The World's Sweatshop: Labor's Lashes

Chinese Girls Toil Brings Pain, Not Riches

By JOSEPH KAHN

Published: October 2, 2003

ANSHAN, China — Each eyelash was assembled from 464 inch-long strands of human hair, delicately placed in a crisscross pattern on a thin strip of transparent glue. Completing a pair often took an hour. Even with 14-hour shifts most girls could not produce enough for a modest bonus.

"When we started to work, we realized there was no way to make money," said Ma Pinghui, 16. "They were trying to cheat us."

She and her friend Wei Qi, also 16 and also a Chinese farm girl barely out of junior high school, had been lured here by a South Korean boss who said he was prepared to pay $120 a month, a princely sum for unskilled peasants, to make false eyelashes.

Their local government labor bureau lent its support, recruiting workers and arranging a bus to take them to the big city of Anshan in northeastern China.

Two months later, bitter that the pay turned out to be much lower, exhausted by eye-straining and wrist-wrenching work, and too poor to pay the exit fee the boss demanded of anyone who wanted out, they decided to escape. But that was not easy. The metal doors of their third-floor factory were kept locked and its windows — all but one — were enclosed in iron cages.

These girls' ill-fated foray to work at Daxu Cosmetics and their attempt to flee one moonless night in May illustrate how even rudimentary workers' rights lag far behind job creation and profits in China's surging economy.

While multinational corporations like Motorola and Intel pay employees middle-class wages to work in world-class factories in this country, the sizzling export sector still relies heavily on smaller operations, both locally and foreign-owned, that assemble toys, clothes, shoes, tools, electronics, decorative items and cosmetic goods. Many measure profits in pennies on the dollar and squeeze workers to make their margins.

Lee Yo Han, the South Korean entrepreneur who runs Daxu, says he came to China about a decade ago mainly because Korean companies could no longer compete in the market for false eyelashes, which sell for as little as 50 cents a set in Asia and the United States.

Mr. Lee, who is 39 years old and speaks only Korean, keeps costs down by finding cheap rental space for his 12 production lines. The plant where Ms. Wei and Ms. Ma worked, along with 100 other young workers from rural Liaoning and Inner Mongolia, occupied the third floor of an old mental hospital.

While he acknowledged the cost pressures, Mr. Lee said he provided a good work environment. In faxed replies to questions about Ms. Ma and Ms. Wei, Mr. Lee described them as callow girls who tried to slip out of a work contract they had signed voluntarily.

"I treat my workers like I treat my own brothers and sisters," Mr. Lee said. "My company is a small one, and the welfare can't compare to a big company's, but I tried my very best."

That is not the view of Ms. Wei, who has since returned penniless to her home village in rural Liaoning Province. "What they called a company was really a prison."

She is a stringy girl with a nervous giggle. Ms. Ma is corn-fed and prone to tears. But they grew up in nearly identical circumstances. Their families live in neighboring villages near China's border with North Korea, where green mountains, crisp fall air and scattered dairy farms are reminiscent of the New England countryside, though far poorer.

They first heard about the job offer in Anshan from an advertisement on local television. Salaries of $120 a month seemed high for farm girls, but the ad was sponsored by the Labor Bureau of Huairen County. The bureau contracted with Mr. Lee to find rural workers and charged a $6 application fee.

"If this had not been arranged through official channels, we would not have let such a young girl go," said Wei Zhixing, Ms. Wei's father.

As soon as they arrived in Anshan, however, the problems began. They were asked to sign a contract that offered monthly pay far below the advertised level, initially just $24, minus a $13 charge for room and board. Bonuses were promised, but only for those who produced eyelashes above quotas.

The contract also demanded that workers pay the boss $58 if they left before the end of the yearlong contract, and $2,400 if they "stole intellectual property" by defecting to a rival eyelash maker.

Such terms are not unusual. Court cases involving unpaid wages, illegal contracts and life-threatening working conditions are common even as China becomes richer, suggesting that cut-throat capitalism and sweatshop factories are as much a part of China's economic revolution today as they were the early days of industrialization in the West.

Beijing often looks the other way. Despite a long streak of fast growth, generating jobs for the country's 350 million peasants remains urgent. At least 150 million rural laborers have no steady income, according to government estimates. They are viewed as a source of unrest that could threaten the Communist Party's power.

Making sure the jobs created meet China's own standards for safety and fairness is a lower priority. Officials rarely punish factory owners for labor abuses, and workers, restricted by laws against forming unions, rarely press for better conditions.